Election Night Reporting

Quicklinks

The Department of Elections publishes unofficial results for all Virginia elections to its website on the night of the election. The results are entered by each of Virginia’s local general registrar offices into the Department’s centralized results reporting system, which then publishes the updated results every 10 minutes to the website.

The results are available in both a viewable HTML version and in a downloadable, comma-delimited text version (CSV). Additional downloadable files are available which show precincts reporting and changes to results after midnight on election night. To access these files, view the following links:

State and federal contest results are unofficial until certified by the State Board of Elections (SBE). The SBE must meet to certify the November election results on the fourth Monday in November (§ 24.2-679).

Results are likely to shift some during the days immediately following an election as the local electoral boards complete their canvass.

In most cases, provisional results are not reported until the canvass is completed by the local electoral board. If provisional votes have been cast by voters who do not have the proper form of identification, those voters have until 12:00 p.m. on the Friday after the election to provide their proper identification.

Write-in candidate who are winners will have their names added to the results links as the local electoral boards work through their canvass process. If non-winning write-in candidate details are needed, please contact the appropriate local general registrar’s office after the canvass has completed (Tuesday after the election).

CSV Results File Details

The CSV results file contains a single line for each candidate for each precinct involved in the election. For example, if you have two candidates running for an office statewide, the file will contain one row for the first candidate for the first precinct and will contain another row for the second candidate for the first precinct. For referendums, there will only be one line per precinct. The “yes” votes appear in the “total_votes” column and the “no” votes appear in the “negative_votes” column.

To arrive at the number of precincts reporting, you can parse the CSV file to count the distinct precincts for each contest and subtract the provisional precincts. To see which precincts have reported, use the CSV Precincts Reporting CSV file indicated above.